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Preserving Cross-Modal Stability for Visual Unlearning in Multimodal Scenarios

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-09-30 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Visual modality is the most vulnerable to privacy leakage in real-world multimodal applications like autonomous driving with visual and radar data; Machine unlearning removes specific training data from pre-trained models to address privacy leakage, however, existing methods fail to preserve cross-modal knowledge and maintain intra-class structural stability of retain data, leading to reduced overall and other modalities' performance during visual unlearning; to address these challenges, we propose a Cross-modal Contrastive Unlearning (CCU) framework, which integrates three key components: (a) selective visual unlearning: employing inverse contrastive learning to dissociate visual representations from their original semantics, (b) cross-modal knowledge retention: preserving other modalities' discriminability through semantic consistency, and (c) dual-set contrastive separation: preserving the model performance via isolation of structural perturbations between the unlearn set and retain set; extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of CCU, and our method achieves a 7.12% accuracy improvement with only 7% of the unlearning time compared to the top-accuracy baseline.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.23895,
  title  = {Preserving Cross-Modal Stability for Visual Unlearning in Multimodal Scenarios},
  author = {Jinghan Xu Yuyang Zhang Qixuan Cai Jiancheng Chen Keqiu Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.23895},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

9 pages,4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:02:38.685Z